Talk:WataMote Chapter 152/@comment-37874552-20190308201554
Because I'm unpopular, I've come up with a theory about Uchi. This is a skyscraper of text, so be warned. First, Uchi is normal. Really normal. If we focus our memory right, we'll remember her, and there were a lot of her. The person we'll remember clearest when we remember her is ourselves. No one wants to think so, but at that age I and everyone I really talked to went through it, confused obsessive yearning "love". Face it, who has not stalked or surveilled someone, while in that state? Everyone has, if only between classes or minutes or seconds a day, paying attention to that puzzling person who infuriatingly may not be someone you understand liking. The rich girl or guy can't shake thoughts about a scruffy, poor kid. The scruffy, poor kid can't stop thinking about a rich kid. Precociously successful users of the other sex start fantasizing about being the passive partners of someone of their own. Proudly ignorant kids secretly envy and yearn for smart kids, and vice versa. "Bad" kids yearn for "good" kids. All these kids, like Uchi, begin mysteriously appearing where they normally don't belong, paying strange attention in ways people don't associate with them. As Akane said, looking at Uchi, "What is she doing here?" Why? Because we all have voids within that need to be filled in specific, specialized ways. It's human. One of those voids is the need to achieve identity through the internalization of difference. Uchi, I think, sees herself as an "Emoji", a simple-minded, simple-faced innocuous person as Tomoko sees her. Her friends value her, but she doesn't know why. She's a cypher to herself, and she feels like a fraud, because like several other kids in the series, especially Yuri, she suspects that she really doesn't exist. Being "normal" is hell. She fucking hates it. So this perverse, "disgusting" person, this panty-stealing weirdo, suddenly becomes relevant. But desiring an acquaintenance with that person, or an intimate relationship of indeterminate and possibly unwelcome nature, is scary as hell. So Uchi has to see Tomoko as "disgusting" for wanting her and thereby kept at some kind of distance, because Tomoko not wanting her would make Uchi collapse back in upon herself, and she fucking hates herself. But she wants Tomoko. How? Maybe sexually. I mean, every freaking thing people are when they are teenagers if sexually charged. Sex is the functioning brain. It's more subtle for girls, but still true. But really, Uchi just wants to be Tomoko's friend. She wants to hang out and talk with Tomoko the way Tomoko's "harem" does, because she knows they are true friends who really know the girl she wants to get to know. The irony is that Uchi has a stellar group of friends, and finding her way back around to them will mean she is finally the person who can talk with Tomoko as a friend, who doesn't feel like an emoji, who doesn't hate her own guts.